By the age of 58 a country – like a man – should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and ill, who we are and how we appear to others, warts and all. And though we still harbour occasional illusions about ourselves, we know they are, for the most part, just illusions. In short, we are adults.

But the state of Israel, which has just turned 58, remains curiously immature. The country’s social transformations – and its many economic achievements – have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: confident of its uniqueness; certain that no one “understands”; quick to take offence, and to give it. Like many adolescents, Israel is convinced – and aggressively asserts – that it can do as it wishes; that its actions carry no consequences; that it is immortal.

That, Israeli readers will say, is the prejudiced view of the outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country is simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: protecting its interests in an inhospitable part of the globe.

Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge foreign criticism, much less act on it? Because the world and its attitudes have changed. It is this change – largely unrecognised in Israel – to which I want to draw attention. Before 1967 Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the west. Most admirers (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism – or else a paragon of modernising energy, “making the desert bloom”.

I remember in the spring of 1967 how student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel before the Six-Day War – and how little attention was paid either to the Palestinians or to Israel’s collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous 1956 Suez adventure. For a while these sentiments persisted. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups were offset by growing public acknowledgement of the Holocaust. Even the inauguration of illegal settlements and the invasion of Lebanon did not shift the international balance of opinion.

But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that Israel’s victory in June 1967 and its occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified its shortcomings to a watching world. The routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority; today, computer terminals and satellite dishes put Israel’s behaviour under daily global scrutiny. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel.

The universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced in political cartoons, is the Star of David emblazoned on a tank. Today the universal victims, the emblematic persecuted minority, are not Jews but Palestinians. This shift does little to advance the Palestinian case but it has redefined Israel forever. Israel’s long-cultivated persecution mania no longer elicits sympathy. The country’s national narrative of macho victimhood appears to many now as simply bizarre: a collective cognitive dysfunction. Israel, in the world’s eyes, is a normal state; but one behaving in abnormal ways. As for the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic, this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behaviour, and its insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism, is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in western Europe and much of Asia....

If you can, read it all. I had to stop the excerpt there because I find his notion that anti-Jewish sentiment is caused by.... Jews ... to be completely and utterly... antisemitic. I know, I know, he set it up so that if I say that, it only goes to affirm his "point." But I don't care for his nasty little trap, and I will call antisemitism wherever I sense it ... as long as I am free to do so.

I think a little Jabotinsky is in order.

"We constantly and very loudly apologize... Instead of turning our backs to the accusers, as there is nothing to apologize for, and nobody to apologize to, we swear again and again that it is not our fault... Isn't it long overdue to respond to all these and all future accusations, reproaches, suspicions, slanders and denunciations by simply folding our arms and loudly, clearly, coldly and calmly answer with the only argument that is understandable and accessible to this public: "Go to Hell!"?

You know, my dear readers, this may be the first time that we personally have had to face the cosmic virus of Jew-hatred, but it is not the first time for us as a people. Tony Judt may say that "today everything is different," but he's wrong. The way Israel-the-country is being treated, the appearance of "anti-Jewish sentiment," it's all as old as the hills. Israel-the-people have many times faced this same beast. It has never made an appearance and then crawled back under its rock, not without first culminating in the spilling of Jewish blood in one form of bloody conflagration or another. And we still have not learned what to do with it. I say let us look to our brilliant and courageous ancestors; let us look to the Jabotinskys who came before us and receive their wisdom. If not in their time, then in ours.

"We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change and we do not want to."

Afterthought:

Yes, I know Judt is Jewish and once lived on an Israeli kibbutz, but I'm sorry, that apparently doesn't preclude his making antisemitic statements. And even though he is a fellow Jew and all Jews are responsible for one another ...maybe because all Jews are responsible for one another... I cannot be silent. His opinions are hateful and they geometrically increase the danger which threatens us, all the more so because he is a Jew.

Comments

"Yes, I know Judt is Jewish and once lived on an Israeli kibbutz, but I'm sorry, that apparently doesn't preclude his making antisemitic statements."
Yadda, yadda, yadda. He and his ilk have two faiths, the other Marxism. When Moscow saw its client states and weapons fail in 1967 they went bonkers with an anti-semitic campaign. Cultic Marxist dogmatism dictated Western lefties to follow the Moscow line. The reason Eastern European elites today don't talk like this is because they knew the propaganda was Soviet B.S. Western leftist elites are still in their immature phase, like Judt. The ones that are Jewish sound crazier because they are more deeply conflicted by the Soviet foreign policy agitprop.

Tony Judt is not a Marxist. He has condemned Marx-Leninism's abuses for his entire career as a public intellectual. In fact, much of his work focuses on the moral blindedness of West European communist intellectuals.
And the use of the term, "self-hating" Jew, is really ridiculous. All Jews should speak with one voice concerning Israeli policy?

I think a LOT of Jabotinsky is in order. I am so sick of all the apologizing and assuming that our enemies are our fault. I am sick of Jews confusing Judaism and Jewishness with socialism and assuming that socialism is a substitute for tzedaka. It's just greed wrapped in a politically-themed paper.
Who gives a rat's backside if Judt is Jewish and/or once lived on a kibbutz? I decline to accept him as Pope, prophet, or posek.
I fail to see that the fact that the Palestinians repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot is the responsibility of Israel. Isn't ANYTHING that happens in the Palestinian entity the responsibility of the Palestinians themselves?
This Jew here is standing with folded arms, saying "Go to Hell"